Anti-Orban Rallies Snowball to Denounce Hungary’s Illiberal Rule
New Anti-Orban Demonstration Held in Hungary
(Bloomberg) -- Protests against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s regime grew as an initial call to repeal a law on overtime work widened into a demand for a return to liberal democracy, including independent courts and free public media.
The demonstration on Sunday was the biggest of four in five days and highlighted the backlash against Orban’s centralization of power. The 55-year old won a third consecutive election in April and his cabinet is undergoing a European Union probe over accusations that it’s undermining the rule of law. The protest also showed exasperation on the part of critics for their inability to influence policy and slow the country’s slide away from democracy.
The rally climaxed at the headquarters of state media, where opposition lawmakers tried and failed to have their demands read out on air. With police using tear gas to keep thousands of angry protesters from entering the building, the tension had echoes of 2006, when demonstrators set fire to the state television building to kick off the worst street violence since the country’s uprising against Soviet rule half-a-century earlier.
Orban, who was in opposition then, harnessed the protests to return to power in 2010. Unlike then, the government now enjoys broad support in opinion polls and an economy that’s growing at the fastest pace in 13 years. Rallies now are “the aggressive display of a tiny minority,” Gergely Gulyas, the most senior minister under Orban, told public radio on Sunday.
While smaller than some other opposition protests over the past eight years, the ones in the past week showed a kind of resilience unseen since Orban’s return to power as thousands braved freezing temperatures day after day and skipped Christmas shopping to make their voices heard. The protest also galvanized and united opposition parties of all stripes, who took the lead at the demonstrations.
Opposition lawmakers’ plea to protesters to avoid violence prevailed on Sunday. The politicians, who held a sit-in at the public broadcaster overnight and live-streamed developments, were forcibly removed from the building early Monday. One of them, Akos Hadhazy, called state media the “heart of the system” for what he said was its role in “manipulating” the population.
“This is the heart and motor” of the regime “whose purpose is to silence critics,” Hadhazy said Monday in a live-stream after his eviction.
Orban has converted state media into a government mouthpiece that rarely gives similar airtime to opposition viewpoints. International observers at April’s election said the vote took place in an “adverse climate” in part because the public broadcaster “clearly favored” the ruling party in its newscasts.
Complementing that is now one of Europe’s biggest pro-government media empires, comprising hundreds of commercial outlets brought under a single legal umbrella last month and which Orban exempted from regulatory checks.
The demonstrations were triggered by the passage of laws on Wednesday that allow employers to ask for 60 percent more overtime of workers annually. Labor unions initially focused protests on that piece of legislation, which critics dubbed the “slave law.”
But the bill pales in significance to another law passed the same day, which essentially created a new top court and placed it under government oversight, said Anita Seprenyi, who came to Sunday’s protest draped in an EU flag. The slave law may have been a “smokescreen” to divert voters’ attention, she said.
“What Orban is doing is nothing less than trampling on European values,” said Seprenyi.
Opposition parties have vowed to emulate the French Yellow Vest movement -- which managed to win concessions on pensions, taxes and the minimum wage after a month of protests -- but it’s far from certain that the same will work on Orban.
Orban’s lawmakers have a two-thirds majority in parliament, allowing them to pass any law without opposition support.
To contact the reporter on this story: Zoltan Simon in Budapest at zsimon@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net, Andras Gergely
©2018 Bloomberg L.P.